


Eric Chavez Goes to Hollywood

by candle_beck



Category: Baseball RPF
Genre: First Time, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-12
Updated: 2011-09-12
Packaged: 2017-10-23 16:12:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/252301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/candle_beck/pseuds/candle_beck
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just because he's your second choice doesn't necessarily mean he's a bad idea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eric Chavez Goes to Hollywood

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted August 2005.

Eric Chavez Goes to Hollywood  
By Candle Beck

 

This is how it used to be:

Mark Mulder and Eric Chavez lived together in a rented house with gray carpets and white walls in 2000, Mulder’s first year up. They had a pool and a stove that filled the kitchen with the smell of gas whenever it was turned on. They had a single pot, a single pan, and five plates, three of which would be shattered before the All-Star break. Plastic cups and empty bottles were everywhere.

Chavez had the bigger bedroom, because Mulder was in Trip-A Sacramento for the first month of the season. They’d both been the A’s first draft pick, 1996 and 1998 respectively, but Mulder had been second overall and Chavez had been tenth. Not that it mattered.

The light in the hallway didn’t work. And Chavez could hear Mulder laughing on the phone through the wall they shared.

Mulder slept through his alarm most mornings, and it would howl and screech until Chavez pounded on the wall and shouted for Mulder to wake the fuck up, turn that shit off. The alarm would cut out, and Chavez would hold his breath, waiting for Mulder to appear in his doorway.

They shared the same box of cereal, went to Costco together because only Chavez had a membership card. It was weird, but good. Eric Chavez’s whole life, at that point: weird, but good.

Mulder wasn’t having a very good year. He’d leave the game when they were trailing, the fifth inning, the sixth, sometimes the fourth, having thrown too many pitches for a rookie. By the time they lost and everyone filed back down to the clubhouse, Mulder was already showered and dressed, acting like nothing had happened.

Chavez drove him home, a lot of the time, if they’d come in together or planned to tomorrow. Mulder made his seat go back as far as it could, fiddling with a baseball and talking shit. Chavez mostly just nodded along, watching to see the tension sink out of Mulder’s shoulders, his hands loosening.

Mulder was twenty-two years old for the first part of that first year, and everybody was waiting for him, but Chavez was the only one who could get him to come when he was called. Chavez figured that was because he knew how to keep quiet.

One morning, Chavez awoke to find Mulder asleep in the hall outside his door. He had gotten his shirt half off, still tied up around one arm and his neck, pulling his shoulder out of joint. His head was butted against the wall, flattening the spikes of his hair.

Chavez knelt beside him and flicked Mulder’s forehead until Mulder shivered and groaned, sank upwards. Mulder’s wet blue eyes stared up at him.

“Chavvy, I fucked it up,” Mulder whispered.

Chavez tipped his head to the side, his fingers on the hatch-marks crossing Mulder’s cheek. “What?” he asked, his voice equally low.

Mulder shook his head, turned his eyes away. “It’s just terrible,” he said, and Chavez pulled him to his feet, didn’t ask again.

He took Mulder to the kitchen and sat him down, chattered on about anything that came to mind, making them breakfast and not giving Mulder a chance to talk, not that Mulder would have. He tried to think what it could be, but no. He didn’t want to know. Mulder was better when he was perfect.

The smell of orange juice and burnt toast drew up around them, and Chavez kicked at Mulder’s feet under the table, his mouth tasting sticky and sweet.

Slowly, the lines on Mulder’s face disappeared.

*

In June, it got hot very quickly, and Mulder spent most of his time not wearing a shirt. Chavez spent most of his time trying not to stare. Skinny as a base line and way too tall, Mulder’s back got sunburned and his stomach trembled like a drum when he laughed. Eric Chavez had a recurring dream where he reached out to touch Mulder’s chest and his hand slid through skin and bone and heart, his bloody fingers emerging on the other side.

He had other dreams too, though. Worse than nightmares, because Mark Mulder was the best friend he’d made up here, best friend by far, and now he couldn’t stop picturing him facedown on a bed. The insides of his cheeks were ragged from being bitten.

Chavez had a fine grasp of what he was and wasn’t allowed to be at this level, but the idea that Mulder would stop riding back from the ballpark with him was more horrible than anything the press could do to him. So he kept his distance, played smart.

Mulder brought home girls and winked at Chavez with his hand on the small of her back, her hair brushing his arm. Chavez slept on the couch in the living room, because he could hear everything through the bedroom wall.

Chavez was good for awhile, a month or two at least, and then one night while drunk, he fell against Mulder and Mulder’s arms came up around his back, one of Mulder’s hands under his shirt. Chavez burrowed his face in Mulder’s neck and rubbed his nose, opened his mouth on the place where Mulder’s pulse beat fast and thready.

Mulder drew his hands down to Chavez’s hips and hesitated for a moment, a perfect beautiful moment that tasted like sweat and skin, before gently pushing Chavez away, blushing and stuttering, “okay, man, no more alcohol for you, you’re gone, you’re done.”

All of which was true.

Chavez stayed away for a week or two after, unable to believe that he had even tried something like that. He thought he had this bad part of himself under control. It’d been years since it had happened to him, years since he’d let it. High school, and the summer in San Diego when the sky looked like chalk and the ocean like sterling silver. The many things he thought he’d gotten over.

Mulder stayed behind the locked door of his bedroom, the stripe of yellow light, until he got lonely and visibly decided it had been a moment of temporary insanity, and started hollering Chavez’s name again when a funny commercial was on.

*

Towards the end of July, Barry Zito showed up.

Mulder knew him; they’d been in Triple-A together, in Sacramento and before that Vancouver, and before that the Cape Cod Baseball League, and before that the many past lives that Zito was convinced they’d shared. Because Zito was kinda nuts like that.

Mulder brought him home his first night in town, but it was quickly apparent that they weren’t really friends. Chavez ended up entertaining the kid when Mulder disappeared to make a phone call and never came back. Zito wasn’t good at video games, and he made a face when Chavez put on his best rap mix, and wanted to turn off the Playstation when it was time for some cartoon he liked to come on.

Chavez didn’t think he was serious, but Zito, it turned out, was serious almost all the time, or honest, anyway. Something like that.

He didn’t walk Zito to the door when the cab came, and when Mulder finally came back out, Chavez asked, “Is that guy for real?”

Mulder smirked and nodded, and sat next to Chavez on the couch in the sprawling way he had that brought their legs and elbows in close proximity. “You get used to it. Eventually you won’t even notice.”

After the first couple of weeks, it wasn’t Chavez’s concern any longer, because Zito had become Tim Hudson’s shadow and hardly ever came around anymore.

*

Nobody saw it coming. Nobody thought Hudson would be able to tolerate Zito and Zito’s stupid jokes for longer than a day, and Zito would slink like a kicked puppy back to Eric Byrnes, who’d known Zito since Double-A and whose jokes were even stupider.

But Hudson just sort of rolled his shoulders back and made room for Zito in his life, and then they were best friends.

Just like that.

Chavez couldn’t get a handle on it, but then, he didn’t particularly care. Zito and Hudson stood together with their arms folded on the rail, and in the clubhouse, Zito sat half-dressed in front of Hudson’s locker, writing things on small lavender Post-Its and sticking them up on Hudson’s mirror, over the faces in his photographs.

On the plane, Chavez could hear them, Hudson’s measured drawl and Zito’s quick excited chatter, running together like paint, lulling him to sleep. Zito’s handwriting and clumsy drawings were all over Hudson’s arms, blurring with the hours. Hudson’s eyes lit right the fuck up when Zito got to the yard each day.

In some hotel bar somewhere, an afternoon that threatened to kill them with boredom, Mulder and Chavez were playing gin rummy at a back table, only talking to tally up their scores, and Zito and Hudson came in, still wet from the pool.

Mulder waved them over and they moved to make room. Zito leaned over to look at Chavez’s cards and said, “What is that? Gin? What the fuck?”

Chavez scowled and pulled his cards to his chest. “Nothing wrong with gin.”

Zito smiled at Hudson. “We leave them alone for five minutes, look what happens.”

Hudson smiled back, and ordered beers for the two of them, Zito interrupting him to add, “Light, please, light for me.” Mulder covered his mouth with his hand in the way that meant he was holding back laughter.

Chavez was the only one of them who’d play that night, so he was drinking Coke. They were the only people in the bar.

Zito showed them some card tricks, telling the story of the king, queen, son Jack, and dog Ace, who’d gotten into a car crash on their way to the 7-11. Hudson built a card house, and Mulder blew it down.

After awhile, Zito and Hudson fell into some involved inside-joke conversation that revolved around a night neither Mulder nor Chavez had been a part of. They watched Hudson and Zito ramble on for a couple of minutes, and then Chavez kicked Mulder’s foot and asked, “So what’s new with you?”

Mulder half-smiled. “Oh, you know. Drinking in a bar on a Sunday in Cleveland. Still not on local time. Thinking about taking a nap at the park and going out to that club after the game. Same old.”

Chavez nodded, liking the fact that he’d be around for all of that. He drummed his fingers on the deck of cards. “Rematch?”

Nodding, Mulder sat up straighter, and they returned to their comfortable, speechless afternoon, bridge shuffling and dealing from the bottom as Zito and Hudson talked faster and faster beside them.

*

Chavez passed out in the bathroom of a bar in Alameda, and when he opened his eyes, he saw Mulder hyperventilating with his fist pressed into the wall, and Hudson and Zito standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the doorway, casually placing bets on whether or not this would make the sports pages.

He kinda hated them both, right then. But then Hudson paid for the cab and Zito made sure Mulder was put in the backseat beside him, Mulder’s heavy arms around his neck, his forehead damp on Chavez’s cheek, and Chavez was still a good enough Christian to forgive them.

So, fifteen-twenty minutes later, in the front hallway of their house, at which they’d barely managed to arrive in one piece, Chavez was drunker than last time, and maybe Mulder was too, he figured circularly, maybe things were different now.

And he let Mulder slip through his hands, laughing hard with his back against the wall, and Chavez pushed his hand across Mulder’s stomach, asked breathlessly, “Sure you don’t want to fuck me?”

It was all very familiar. Mulder drew in a breath that moved his stomach away under Chavez’s hand, and shook his head, his eyes screwed shut. Chavez was gone again, and he twisted closer, his face against Mulder’s arm, thinking about Mulder’s forehead on his cheek, their messy embrace in the back of the cab.

“Just keep your eyes closed, you won’t even know the difference,” he said, and Mulder’s hand flattened on the side of his face, Mulder’s long fingers in the slick black of his hair. Chavez had the odd sensation of flight in every free part of his body.

And Mulder pushed him away, his ears colored dark red, and Mulder mumbled, “Knock it off, shut up. Don’t say anything else.”

Chavez lost his balance, scraped the heel of his hand on the wall, hit the carpet shoulder first. He laughed as if with someone else’s breath, a high loose cackle that echoed all around them, and he wouldn’t remember any of it.

Mulder would, of course, but Mulder was only a supporting character this time around.

*

Mulder, who’d denied him twice, one shy of the record, called his name from across the clubhouse and Chavez went over there with dirt in his hair and line-chalk on his hands.

“Orange juice, man,” Mulder said without a greeting. “It’s your turn to buy.”

Chavez sat down in the chair, keeping his eyes from tracking Mulder’s arms and legs, watching Zito and Hudson goofing around on the arcade game. “Too much sugar. I read about it in this thing. It’s really, might as well just drink Coke.”

“Fine. Buy some Coke. Buy something. I don’t care.”

Chavez glanced at him. “Are you okay?”

Mulder stuffed his glove into his bag, yanked his jersey off and let it drop to the floor. “I’m fine,” Mulder said, his voice clipped. “My shoulder hurts. But I’m fine.”

He pulled his undershirt over his head, and Chavez caught muscle, skin, the brief flare of his hips. Mulder stood with his shoulders fallen, rubbing the back of his neck. It wasn’t often, a time like this when Mulder looked his age.

“You need to get some sleep,” Chavez told him, his throat dust-clogged. Mulder nodded.

“I know.” He fell into the chair next to Chavez, twenty-three years old and bare-chested, showing more than he meant to. Chavez kept quiet, the slow pull of August weighted like hands on his shoulders, and Mulder exhaled, clearing the strength out of Chavez so that he would have enough to get through the rest of the season.

*

Zito was on their front lawn, yelling Mulder’s name, MarkMarkMark, and it was four in the morning.

Chavez rolled out of bed and tumbled to the floor. His head was on fire. He crawled to the window and shouted all sorts of broken, cursing things, until his voice was the only one echoing across the street.

He was on his knees, resting his forehead on the windowsill, still most of the way asleep. Zito came to the window and reached in, rapped his knuckles on Chavez’s head. Chavez could only wish that he’d left the window shut, that he’d stuffed his ears with cotton or taken a sleeping pill and been rendered dreamless, untouchable.

Instead, he got Zito slurring and saying like he was surprised, “not who I was lookin’ for, you’re a totally different person.”

Chavez lifted his head, pushed himself up with his hands on the sill. Zito was tottering, his hair greasy and matted, endlessly fucked up. “What the fuck do you want?”

“Mulder,” Zito said. “Want Mulder.”

“Yeah, don’t we all,” Chavez muttered under his breath, his mind clearing. “Hang on.”

He went to Mulder’s room and knocked four times before pushing the door open. Mulder’s bed was empty, the covers thrown back. Chavez went outside, found Zito studying his hands intently.

“He’s gone. Not home.”

Zito blinked at him, and then fell down. He just lost his balance standing, and crashed on the grass. Chavez stared down at him, stunned, but Zito got back up again a second later, like it was nothing, like it happened all the time.

“He, he owes me. Lotsa money,” Zito said earnestly. Chavez took his arm, not liking the unhooked glaze in Zito’s eyes. Zito shook him off. “Five hunnert dollars.”

Chavez raised his eyebrows. “He owes you five hundred dollars?”

Zito grinned, and nodded. “Bet me, like, awhile ago, bet me that I’d never drink with Hudson and Hudson’d pass out first. But I did.” Zito’s forehead lined. “He did. Passed out, I mean. Timmy, he just went down, like, pffft.”

Zito almost fell again, and Chavez reached out, but Zito caught himself on the side of the house.

“You drank Huddy under the table and then got in your fucking car? What are you, retarded?”

Zito looked at him helplessly. “Um.”

Chavez rolled his eyes. “Here, sit down before you fall again.” Zito folded himself down on the lawn with relief, and Chavez crouched next to him. “Did you leave Huddy on the floor of a bar somewhere?”

Zito’s face opened in indignation. “No. ‘Course not. He’d kill me, and then never talk to me again. I put him in a cab. I made sure.”

“Well, I don’t know where Mulder is.” Chavez thought about frisking Zito, getting his car keys and hiding them in the coffee jar or something. But it seemed like too much trouble; he was pretty tired. “You can sleep here if you want.”

“Sleep outside? But there’s bugs and stuff.”

Chavez rolled his eyes again. “Jesus, you can sleep inside, idiot. We got a couch.”

Zito scowled at him. “Don’t call me idiot just ‘cause I’m drunk. You’ve been drunk, I’ve seen it.”

Chavez fisted his hands in the grass, the soft ground giving under his knuckles. “Whatever, man. I’m going back to bed.”

He stood, and Zito clutched at his leg, his nails scratching at the back of Chavez’s knee. Chavez twitched—he’d always been ticklish there. “Take me with you,” Zito said with his upturned eyes huge and dark, and Chavez froze. “Take me inside,” Zito clarified. “I won’t find it on my own.”

Exhaling, Chavez offered him a hand and pulled him up, gave Zito a pillow and a blanket and the television remote in case he couldn’t sleep. Zito thanked him and Chavez left the room to the sound of Zito murmuring about how Hudson had been so drunk, shoulda seen, so drunk he almost said yes.

Chavez didn’t know why that sounded so familiar, and he fell asleep thinking about it, woke up to find that Zito had given up on the couch and usurped Mulder’s bed, the door wide open and Zito’s face jammed in the pillow, his arm slung down to the carpet. Chavez smiled without joy, and went to put the coffee on.

*

Then, fair enough, in Boston, it worked out neatly so that Chavez was getting ice for his shoulder when Hudson threw Zito out.

Their voices rose up behind the door, and Chavez cocked his head, cradling the bucket of ice on his hip. A muffled cracking sound, then the door slammed open and Hudson said hoarsely, “already told you no, I’m not like that, will you get the fuck out of here,” and then the scraped stumbling sound of Zito tripping, falling, landing hard on the carpet.

Chavez set the bucket of ice on the ground. He realized absently that he was grinning.

He sauntered out, and Zito was down there, his knees up against his chest, his face lowered. Chavez nudged his ankle, and Zito looked up, one eye gleaming wet, the other starting to swell. He blinked at Chavez, and said roughly, “I can’t believe this keeps happening to me.”

Chavez offered him a hand up, still grinning manically, and clasped Zito’s hand tightly as Zito swayed on his feet. “You, what? Actually expected him to say yes?” Chavez asked, and Zito’s hand jerked in his own, but Chavez wouldn’t let him go.

The skin around Zito’s eye was darkening. It was all just perfect.

Zito’s throat ducked as he swallowed, his good eye widening, and he shook his head, but let Chavez pull him into his room, let Chavez sit him down on the bed while he went back for the ice.

Chavez made an icepack out of a washcloth and stood over Zito, carefully holding it to his eye, his free hand cupped around the back of Zito’s head. Zito’s other eye stared up at him blankly.

“Motherfucker hits hard, doesn’t he?” Chavez asked softly, and Zito’s eye closed as he exhaled a shaky sigh.

Chavez thought about the thing that he was not, the thing that he could not be, and he had a vision of Zito in this hotel room bed tomorrow morning, bleach-white sheets and torn foil, a glass broken under the window.

Chavez thought, ‘so be it.’

*

Making not just one, but two drunken passes at Mark Mulder should have been the stupidest thing that Eric Chavez ever did in his life, but then he found himself pressed up against the door of Barry Zito’s apartment, Zito on his knees with one hand on Chavez’s stomach, holding him still.

Chavez’s hands were full of Zito’s hair. His eyes were full of stars.

It wasn’t what he’d expected, this awful second choice of his. Zito had all these jagged edges, places where Chavez figured he’d be smooth and easy. Zito woke up sharply every couple of nights, his breath caught up in his throat, his face pale and terrified, and never said anything about it.

Zito was on his knees, right where he belonged, and Chavez was moaning, his hands clenched, his heartbeat stammering. Zito was so good at this it was kind of scary. Chavez could hardly breathe. He kept picturing lights in his minds, filaments, fluorescents, naked bulbs swinging from the rafters. Nothing made any sense, and then Zito hollowed his cheeks and opened his throat and the light exploded.

It was that night, or some night like it, and Chavez was trying to get to sleep, impossible because Zito used the wrong kind of detergent on his sheets and it made Chavez’s skin itch. He would have just gone home (it wasn’t like Zito would have cared), but he didn’t like seeing Mulder after fucking around with Zito. He felt like everything they’d done was writ in glow-in-the-dark letters across his face, wouldn’t fade until morning.

Zito rolled over onto his back and asked the ceiling, “You think Hudson hates me?”

Chavez yawned. “Yeah, probably.” Zito glared at him, and Chavez rolled his eyes. “Ask a stupid question, Z.”

Zito rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, and Chavez watched the tight skin of his chest move and pull, slide back into place. “Why would he hate you?” Chavez asked, his fingers twitching against Zito’s leg.

“I keep getting drunk and trying to have sex with him.”

Chavez snorted. Zito didn’t even bother looking at him again. Chavez wanted to get his hands back in Zito’s hair, the pieces of dark blue still painted in among the brown, and he wanted his mouth on Zito’s chest and stomach. It was nothing more than the knowledge that Zito wasn’t going to push him away, unless he bit too hard or drew blood or left a mark, the simple fact that he was allowed—that was the only reason he kept coming around.

“Stop doing that, then,” Chavez told him, and licked Zito’s shoulder. “You got me for that now, right?”

Zito let Chavez’s mouth move down his arm, teeth in the crook of his elbow, Chavez’s tongue tracing the lines of his ribs, and Zito sighed, running his hand absently over Chavez’s back. “Poor substitute,” Zito said softly, and Chavez was pretty sure that was only a joke.

*

By the early fall, they talked about Zito like he was decked in laurel and roses, and Mulder started asking questions.

“Where do you go all the time?”

They were on the deck, reclined in patio chairs, drinking beer under the stars. Chavez stared up at the sky and asked, “What do you mean?”

He heard the plasticky rustle of Mulder shrugging. “You disappear. Like, a lot. I mean, you always have, but I never. I keep forgetting to ask why.”

Chavez shook his head automatically, because it hadn’t been forever, only a few months now. Then he remembered. As far as Mulder was concerned, that was forever. As far as all three of them were concerned, if he wanted to be honest about it, which he didn’t.

Mulder should have asked awhile ago. Chavez should have been prepared.

“I, um. I don’t know. I don’t go anywhere.” Chavez kept his eyes turned upwards, the trees, the stars, the moon, yeah the moon. Coins, he thought fuzzily, sky’s made of money tonight.

“You don’t come home sometimes,” Mulder pointed out, taking a drink of his beer. “I mean, dude. Where are you sleeping?”

Chavez swallowed, and flicked his hand abstractly. “Well, girls, you know?” he said fumblingly. “Like, they, um, take me home? Sometimes, I let them. You know.”

Mulder’s eyebrows twitched upwards. “Girls?”

Chavez flinched, too quickly to be seen. “Yeah,” he said with assurance. “Of course.”

He snuck a look and now Mulder was grinning at him. “Dude! You have to tell me these things. How’m I supposed to know you’re a player if you don’t tell me?”

Chavez’s face heated, and he curled one arm over his stomach. “Oh, well. You know.”

“You said that already,” Mulder answered, but he was grinning, his broad movie-star grin, and Chavez had the bright shabby feeling of getting away with something.

He drank too much and lost his ability to walk, and Mulder hauled him inside, his arm around Chavez’s waist, Chavez’s head bouncing on his shoulder. The words ‘dirty little secret’ had always sounded so good to him, so forbidden and romantic. He kept seeing all the faceless, heartless girls, who couldn’t resist him, who took him home and held him down. By the time he fell asleep, he’d forgotten that it had all been a lie.

*

Zito was scared of thunder. A summer storm, the sky cut to pieces, and every time the thunder came, he jerked, burrowed a little deeper under the covers.

Chavez couldn’t believe it. “Tell me you’re kidding,” he said, when Zito’s fearful breath fell on his ribs. He slid down, pulling the covers over them both.

Zito played dumb. “What? I’m cold.”

Chavez flattened his hand on Zito’s chest. “You are not,” he whispered. “You’re, look at you, you’re scared of the storm.”

“I’m not a fucking kid,” Zito answered sharply, but he didn’t move to pull the covers down. It was pitch-black in there, tar covering Chavez’s eyes.

“No, but you’re scared of the thunder,” he said teasingly, and then the thunder rolled and Zito jerked again, latched one hand on Chavez’s side, clinging to him in slight panic. Chavez snickered lightly. “See?”

“It’s just a bit loud,” Zito claimed, convincing no one, his hand drawing Chavez closer to him, until they were face to face, chest to chest, Zito’s breath on his cheek. “It’s. Sudden.”

“It’s thunder. It’s nothing.”

“Look, I know.” Zito shivered. “It’s not my fault. There was a storm and the power went out and I called for my dad but it was too loud for him to hear me. I musta been three or four.”

Chavez rubbed Zito’s chest comfortingly, still smirking, but of course Zito couldn’t see.

“I’m not scared of anything else,” Zito continued, his voice breaking. “Only one thing, I’m allowed.”

“Sure you are.” Chavez shook his head in amazement. “Bad luck, anyway.”

“Thunder?”

“Oh yeah. Worse than stepping on the line.”

Zito’s mouth twitched against Chavez’s jaw. “You’re just making stuff up now.”

“That’s true. But are you still scared?”

There was a long pause, and then Zito was wrapping an arm around Chavez’s back, burying his face in Chavez’s neck. Chavez laughed, the sound of it low and muffled, and he could feel the sockets of Zito’s eyes, hollowed against his throat.

*

Chavez had dreams that consisted entirely of neon signs. The space behind his eyes highly lit, he woke up more tired than he went to sleep, and sometimes Zito was there, sometimes he wasn’t. Either way, Chavez drank more coffee than was probably wise, his hands trembling, his eyesight blurred.

That year, Zito and Mulder’s first year, flew by.

He woke up and it was the ninth day of October. Their season was over, and Mulder had already gone back to Chicago, and Zito had come over the night before to keep him company, the house crowded with echoes and crushed-up paper cups.

Zito had been out at a club or something; he hadn’t gotten there until late, so they just went to bed without doing anything. It was strange to have Zito in the same bed with him and not be strained and fucked out, to be restless and dry.

He woke up. Zito was pressed against his back, his arm folded uncomfortably between them. The first thing Chavez remembered was that they’d lost the division series. It was a stuck place in his throat, an echo in his mind.

Zito stirred, murmured, and worked his arm free, draped it over Chavez’s body and started messing around, tugging at the hair on Chavez’s chest, scratching his nails on Chavez’s stomach. Chavez squirmed and pushed backwards, and Zito’s breath blew warmly on the back of his neck.

“Hollywood?” he asked with his voice sleep-rough, tipping his head back on Zito’s shoulder.

Zito bit his ear lightly. “Flight’s at two o’clock.”

Chavez hummed, bumping the back of his head into Zito’s nose. “We’ll get you there.” He reached back and curled his hand around Zito’s hip, pulling them flush, chest to back. “This first, okay?”

Zito nodded, kicked the blankets off. “This first.”

*

That off-season, Eric Chavez stayed in Oakland most of the time, and let his hair grow out, and watched the fog roll off San Francisco and disappear into the bay, the boats vanished and the metal rail frozen under his hands.

It was cold, and November felt about a million years old.

He went home to San Diego for Thanksgiving, and got drunk on red wine on the back porch with his brothers. It wasn’t until he was an hour north and still going ninety on the highway that he realized he’d left.

He had Zito’s address in Hollywood written on the back of a receipt, and it took him too long to find it, a ten-story brick building in a bad part of town, flicker-lit by trashcan fires and the guttering streetlamps. Chavez leaned on the buzzer, his eyelids coated with melted lead, his head throbbing.

It was five, ten, fifteen minutes before Zito’s pissed-off voice crackled through the intercom, and Chavez couldn’t help but smile.

“I came to see you,” he said when Zito stopped swearing long enough for him to get a word in. Zito took a long moment.

“Chavvy?”

“Yep. Happy Thanksgiving.”

“It’s three in the morning,” Zito answered, sounding tired. “It’s not Thanksgiving anymore.”

“Yeah, and last time it was four in the morning. Next time, who can say.” Chavez played his fingers over the intercom’s buttons, the messy scrawled names of Zito’s neighbors. “Let me up?”

There was another long pause, then the buzzer sliced through, and Chavez almost missed his grip, but caught it in the end.

Zito’s door was open, and Zito was already back in bed, all the lights off. Chavez tripped over a pair of shoes and laughed at himself, stumbled towards the movement of Zito under the sheets. He crawled in fully-dressed, and Zito’s hands were sleepy and cautious working his jeans off, his mouth hot and worth the drive.

Zito lifted his head, his hair getting in Chavez’s eyes, and held Chavez down by his hips, Chavez straining up, thinking in flags and swatches that he was stronger than Zito, he could get free if he needed to.

“You didn’t have to come so far,” Zito said, his thumbs rubbing Chavez’s stomach. “We mighta found someplace halfway.”

Chavez turned his head to the side, breathing in short pulls, knifes into his lungs. “Don’t wanna hear it, man. I’m here now and that’s all. Just. Here. Like this.” He took Zito’s wrist in his hand and slid it down, dug his teeth into his lip when Zito’s fingers closed around him and started to move. Chavez gasped, arched up. “See, yeah. Yeah.”

Zito lowered his head, biting at Chavez’s mouth, and Chavez saw the highway behind his eyes, flat and black, the clean awareness that he’d drive home in a few hours with a certain taste in his mouth and Zito’s teeth lined up on his throat.

*

The rest of the winter went by blurred, in fast-forward. Strange because it seemed so long in each moment, the quiet of Chavez’s apartment, the give of the street, the sirens in the night. But then it was time to go back to Phoenix, and Chavez couldn’t remember anything that had happened, none of the killer nights when he hadn’t slept, none of the days when he’d been motionless and bored, watching television for twelve hours straight.

He was shaking, on the plane, staring out the window the whole time.

The pitchers were already down, and Chavez was staying in the same condo complex as Mulder; he’d gotten the last available unit because Mulder had called when he’d seen boxes and a moving van. The whole place was packed with major league pitchers.

Chavez tried out his keys and dropped his stuff off, and then went down the hall to Mulder’s for a beer.

Mulder’s off-season had been painfully uninteresting. Chavez listened to the tell of a Midwest winter, the frostbite that had turned the tips of Mulder’s fingers white, then blue, then gray, and the warm water that had brought them back to life, burning like acid. He asked after Mulder’s parents and brothers, and wondered if Lake Michigan ever froze over, if you could walk to Canada in the middle of January.

Mulder looked exactly the same. He left the television on, a basketball game moving colorful and fast behind them.

The door was left slightly ajar, because they were all friends here, and Zito knocked perfunctorily before pushing it open.

“Dude, you wanna go get some-” Zito stopped abruptly, seeing Chavez, his eyes widening. “You’re here,” he said with a lace of excitement in his voice, and then flushed, cleared his throat. “How’s it going?” he asked more casually.

Chavez couldn’t take his eyes away, a stupid grin on his face. It’d been three months since the day after Thanksgiving, when Zito had walked him to the door and kissed the side of his mouth. Zito was more tan, the shadows back under his eyes. He was wearing a red shirt with a hole in the shoulder, and Chavez licked his lips unthinkingly.

They made small talk and Chavez had forgotten Mulder was in the room until he said, “We’ll go for dinner in a little bit, okay? I’ll call you.” Zito nodded, lifted his eyebrows slightly at Chavez, and left.

Chavez waited a minute or two before telling Mulder, “’Kay, I gotta go unpack.”

Mulder looked at him in surprise. “You didn’t finish your beer.”

Chavez tipped it back, draining the last of it in one long swallow. He clapped the bottle on the table, said, “See ya,” and was out the door without waiting for Mulder’s reply.

Zito was waiting at the stairs, leaning back against the wall, smiling when Chavez came for him. Chavez had his hand halfway down Zito’s jeans in the stairwell, had Zito snickering and pushing him away.

“Your hair got long,” Zito said in the hallway, running his hand through it, tugging.

Chavez rolled his head under Zito’s hand, a tight prickle skittering down his spine. “Too lazy to get it cut.”

“I like it, it’s good,” Zito said, and shouldered the door open.

Zito’s condo was the same as Mulder’s, the same as Chavez’s. His cell phone was vibrating in his pocket, against the back of Chavez’s hand, and Chavez extracted himself to pull the phone out, look at the little screen.

“It’s Huddy,” he said, his eyebrows pulling down, stepping back. Zito pulled him forward, took the phone out of his hand and tossed it on the couch.

“He’ll call back,” Zito said with a grin, and one hand went to the back of Chavez’s neck, the other hooked in his belt. Zito kissed him so hard it kinda hurt, and whispered against Chavez’s mouth, “Missed this.”

Chavez nodded blindly, pushed his hands up under Zito’s shirt, spring training and so happy his chest ached.

*

On and on, and 2001 was very similar to 2000, except that their team was better, and Zito turned up whenever Chavez wanted him, like a magic trick. The room, whichever room it happened to be at that moment, would empty eventually, if they gave it enough time, and they’d be left alone and Chavez couldn’t keep his hands off him.

Once, even, the room wasn’t empty, Byrnes was passed out under the window and Chavez went down on Zito on the bed, his head under the covers, Zito’s cargo shorts open and his boxers scrunched down just far enough, Zito biting down on his own hand. Afterwards, Zito kept petting his head and saying into his ear, “you’re crazy, you know that, fuckin’ lunatic,” the heat of their bodies under the blankets stifling.

Mulder was so good that year, Chavez almost couldn’t watch him pitch. He kept waiting for everything to go south, for Mulder’s shoulder to give out or maybe his back, looking for the slider to flatten, the curve to hang, but it never happened. The disaster of Mulder’s rookie year still hung around him like pieces of crepe paper, but Chavez seemed to be the only one who could see it.

They lived together again, this house very much like last year’s, painted blue instead of yellow, the kitchen floor tiled with octagons rather than hexagons, but when drunk, Chavez kept forgetting.

“You’re just a fucking rookie,” he told Mulder angrily at one point, swiping the bottle out of his hand, and Mulder had blinked at him for a moment before starting to laugh.

“Oh man, you’ve got to be kidding me,” Mulder said through his laughter.

Chavez remembered then, that this was Year Two of the best phase of his life, but he was often belligerent this time of night, sitting on the living room carpet the way they were.

“Rookie for life,” he muttered. “Rookie at heart, that’s what counts.”

Mulder shook his head, grinning. “Kid, kid, kid,” he hummed, and Chavez hated it when Mulder made a point of Chavez being younger than him.

“Shut up.” He punched his fingers at the videogame controller, sending his guy spiraling out in flames.

“It’s different this year, you know?” Mulder said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. Chavez also hated it when Mulder started to attempt profundity, as typically happened six beers in.

“Not really.” Chavez waved a hand between them. “You’re still here. I’m still here. And the other guys, Huddy and Miguel and everybody. Zito, still here.” Chavez thought about Zito for awhile, Zito’s scrawny arms and smooth chest. He smiled without being aware of it. “All the important stuff’s the same.”

“Just because you get confused, doesn’t mean it’s the same.”

That only made Chavez’s head spin. He lay back on the floor to get his bearings. Mulder’s head bobbed in his peripheral vision.

“Are you giving up?” Mulder asked, nudging Chavez’s controller where it rested on his stomach.

Chavez sighed. “Yeah, think so.”

“Cool. I win.”

Chavez closed his eyes. “You always win.”

“This time, I barely even had to try.”

Chavez smiled slightly, seeing Mulder’s face in his mind’s eye, happy victorious bend to his mouth, the unlined skin around his eyes. Though idly about when Mulder used to drive him crazy, not so long ago. And maybe stuff had changed, whether or not that was what he’d intended.

*

Two-three-four nights later, Chavez asked Zito, “Are you still trying to have sex with Hudson?”

Zito’s hand, which was nicely occupied inside Chavez’s boxers, stopped moving, and Zito cocked an eyebrow. “Right this second? No.”

Chavez squirmed, wanting to get Zito’s hand going again, wanting his question answered. “Don’t be a jerk.”

Zito took his hand out entirely, and Chavez groaned, his lips pressed tightly together. “Okay,” Zito said agreeably, drumming his fingers on Chavez’s stomach. “Anything else you don’t want me to be?”

Chavez put one arm up over his eyes. “A fucking tease.”

“You’re the one asking totally rude questions instead of just lying there like you’re supposed to. I mean, jeez.”

“How is that a rude question?” Chavez asked defensively. “I’m just curious.”

“Considering where my hand just was, anything other than, ‘where have you been all my life,’ is a rude question.”

Chavez took his arm down, mocked a sarcastic smile up at Zito. “Ha.”

Zito grinned, and leaned down, licking Chavez’s stomach, making him start and clench his hand on Zito’s shoulder. “Where’ve you been, man,” Zito sing-songed, his breath warm and fantastic. “All my life, tell me please.”

“Crazy,” Chavez murmured, combing through Zito’s hair, pressing on the back of his head so that Zito would have no choice but to use his teeth.

Zito did, and then a little while later his tongue, and his fingers, and everything else, Chavez’s legs over his back, Chavez’s boxers hanging off his ankle. Chavez was left broken up, blown apart.

He was panting, waiting for his eyesight to return, and Zito slid up next to him, kissed him on the mouth and told him, “No, I’m not still trying to have sex with him. And you don’t want to sleep with Mulder anymore.”

Chavez inhaled sharply and pressed his nose against Zito’s cheek, squeezing his eyes shut even tighter. Zito shouldn’t have known, but how could he not? Zito wasn’t blind. “I don’t,” he whispered, astonished because he was telling the truth.

“I know.” Zito smiled against his face, stroking Chavez’s neck. “It’s enough, babe, I know that now.”

Chavez flipped him over, pinned him down. It would be years, he realized, years and years before he’d get over Zito being his second choice, before they’d each forgive that particular trespass. It didn’t matter; they had all the time in the world.

*

On and on. Chavez woke up one morning and it was July, he woke up the next day and it was August, woke up the next and it was September. He woke up with the slow and irresistible feeling that something was passing him by.

He woke up and the season was over, blink and you’d miss it. Zito wasn’t there; he’d flown to L.A. straight from New York. Mulder wasn’t there either. Chavez had heard from Giambi that Mulder had driven all night after losing the fifth game, and wound up in Canada, but he was pretty sure that was a lie.

So New York City was there beyond the window and it was raining, a low gray huddled around the buildings, and the adrenaline of the past three months had drained as he slept. Every piece of him hurt.

In the cab to the airport, he called Zito three times, and never got through. He didn’t leave a message—there wasn’t much to say.

He made a promise: won’t go to Hollywood this off-season. Won’t show up at Zito’s door with a duffel bag and half the rent. Won’t be this fucking gone on Barry Zito.

He watched the city scroll by and everyone looked scared and heartbroken. It had only been a month since what had happened, happened. Eric Chavez’s simple little life, his kid job and teenage romance, didn’t mean anything here, not now.

He was exhausted.

He slept on the plane and was jarred awake as the wheels hit the ground in San Diego. His back was twisted metal by that point, but he didn’t have to worry about it for four months. He had five voicemails waiting for him, two from his parents, one from an old friend, one hang-up, and one from Mark Mulder, who said something unintelligible with traffic behind him, sounding fall-down drunk and pissed off.

His father was waiting for him at baggage claim. Chavez wanted to turn and run back into the terminal, hijack a plane of his own, and fly north.

*

He couldn’t keep his promise, which anyone who could read the stitches the way he could really should seen coming.

A week into their off-season, Chavez borrowed his brother’s truck and made the drive to Hollywood in under an hour, and that had to be some kind of record. Zito let him in with a grin, and they spent three days locked up in that crummy apartment, until Chavez’s brother left a particularly threatening message and Chavez left Zito naked and asleep, knowing he would never leave if he woke Zito up first.

Zito didn’t call him. Two weeks later, Chavez went back to Oakland.

A day before his birthday, Zito came to see him, and that time it was six days. They only put on shirts to open the door for the delivery people. They ate Chinese food, and pizza, Thai and deli sandwiches, the case of oranges Chavez’s mom had sent, sticky-handed, sweet all over. They watched every movie Chavez owned a half dozen times, drank tap water and tasted like metal. At some point, Chavez claimed that there was no way he could ever have sex again, it was physically impossible, and Zito turned him onto his stomach, proved him wrong.

By the fifth day, it hurt to do anything except sleep. And when he slept, he dreamed of Zito, Zito on the field, Zito driving him somewhere, Zito leaning back against the kitchen counter, drinking coffee in his boxers. It was unclear what was real.

He was too sore to get out of bed, and Zito leaned over him fully dressed, whispered, “I’m going now, man, okay? I’ll see you in Phoenix.”

Chavez reached out groggily, closed his hand in Zito’s shirtfront, found the strength to pull him off balance, Zito collapsing on the bed beside him, laughing. His sneakers were mucking up the sheets and Chavez didn’t care. He pressed his face against Zito’s chest, breathed in through Zito’s shirt, Zito’s coat falling around his ears.

He said, “stay stay stay.”

Zito palmed his head. “I gotta go. My sister, the band, remember?”

Chavez wasn’t all the way awake, and didn’t want to be—it hurt to be awake. His legs, his lower back, the backs of his arms, throbbing like individual heartbeats. His neck had been wrenched at some point. But Zito smelled good, fresh out of the shower, and Zito’s hand was wide and warm on the back of his neck.

Zito had obligations, though, a life beyond this. Chavez couldn’t stand it.

“Yeah, go,” he mumbled, releasing his grip on Zito’s shirt and slumping back. “Tell her I say hi.”

Zito’s hand rested on his chest, tapping his fingers thoughtfully. “You know, I never thought it’d be like this,” he said, and Chavez opened his eyes, saw Zito smile and kiss his fingertips, press them down on Chavez’s sternum, and Chavez closed his eyes again.

*

Chavez started slow in 2002, as he did every year, as they all did every year, and didn’t talk much for awhile. He didn’t talk much anyway, so nobody really noticed.

Near the end of April, Zito wrote in soap on the bathroom mirror: ‘This too shall pass.’

Chavez saw it a little while later, after Zito woke him up by climbing into bed and pressing his cold hands against the small of Chavez’s back. He read it, and went back into the bedroom, pulled the sheets off Zito’s head so he could laugh at him, so deep, man, wow. Zito messed up Chavez’s hair and explained seriously that it was a fable, a Middle Eastern story about all the wisdom in the world fitting on a small piece of paper.

It sounded Biblical to Chavez, but then, most everything did. He took to reciting it quietly to himself in the mornings, remembering faintly some pop psychology magazine article he’d read once about affirmations. Say it often enough and it’ll come true.

It did come true, for all that Zito took his philosophy from Xeroxed pamphlets handed out on the streets, and Chavez began to hit, began to take his walks, began to see the ball disappear four hundred feet off his bat. The press started to eye him again, started to say, “As Eric Chavez goes, so go the Oakland A’s.” Same as every year.

He saw Zito once, early in June, a half a block away, standing in front of the open door of a bar. The music from inside was so loud it blew Zito’s hair back. The light was red and bent through the doorway, shaped as cleanly as a baseball card. Zito was yelling back at someone inside, someone invisible from where Chavez was hailing a cab. He couldn’t hear.

And then Zito spread his arms out, like, what do you want me to do about it, and tilted his chin up, flash and smoke and pure as gold, and Chavez was staring like it was the last thing he’d ever see, figuring that if the team could go as he went now, they wouldn’t have to worry about the Yankees for the rest of their lives.

*

Halfway through the season, Zito was the best pitcher in the whole world, and everybody was pretending they didn’t notice. It was like living endlessly in the eighth inning of a no-hitter. Chavez had to stay away from him when they were in public. It was getting near impossible to control himself.

So he left Zito playing the arcade game with Byrnes, and went into the side room in the clubhouse to wake Mulder up from his nap. Mulder was stretched out on his back, too long for the couch, his legs hanging over the arm, and he had a cushion over his face. Chavez lifted it up, and smacked Mulder with it, startling him awake.

“Jesus,” Mulder said, his eyes opening into a glare. “Worst fucking alarm clock ever.”

Chavez grinned and pulled a chair over. Mulder liked to take his time getting up, moving one limb at a time. “Were you asleep?”

“Kinda,” Mulder answered, rolling his shoulders, twisting up to make his back crack. “Halfway.”

Chavez kicked his feet up on the couch, tucked against Mulder’s side. Mulder just lay there like it was nothing, like there’d never been a time when he’d had to worry about Chavez trying to stick his hand down his pants.

Chavez kept making half-hearted plans to move, flipping through the classifieds, making appointments with real estate agents and then not showing up. He didn’t know why he couldn’t go through with it, except to say that Mulder was a leitmotif in his life, a constant. It was probably bad luck to fuck with that.

Still, though, when he shut his eyes, he saw himself running. Which seemed like some kind of sign.

“I feel good, man,” Chavez said, realizing abruptly that it was true. He’d started to take it for granted, almost stopped noticing. He hardly even remembered what it had been like before, back when a year was a long time, before the months started going like three-pitch strikeouts.

Mulder smiled, his eyes peacefully shut. “Yeah?”

Chavez nodded. “Yeah. Feel like. Like something good’s gonna happen.”

“Something good already is happening. What, you haven’t been paying attention?” Mulder looked up then, shifting and warm against the bottoms of Chavez’s feet. He had his cocky, go-ahead-and-try-motherfucker look on his face, his eyes narrowed, his crooked tooth showing.

“I know, I know. It’s all beautiful, right.”

Mulder laughed, stretching his arms above him. “You going to the cages?”

“Planned to.”

“Company?”

Chavez thought about that for a minute. “Nah. I’ll be all right.”

Mulder started the slow process of sitting up, and Chavez took his feet down so he’d have room to sit properly. “You know what’s gonna be weird?” Mulder asked, his hands tangled together and hanging off his knees. His head was bowed.

“What?”

Mulder didn’t look up at him, and answered, “Everything that comes after this.” He stood, his joints popping, and Chavez stared up at him, unsure of how to respond. But Mulder only smiled. “Come play cards after you get back.”

Mulder left, and Chavez sat there for awhile longer, before saying to the empty room, “Yeah, okay.”

*

Zito and Hudson were talking in the kitchen, and Chavez stood just around the corner, his back against the wall, his head tipped. His beer hung from his fingers, and he wasn’t sure if he’d planned this, if it was some kind of strategy, or just ended up there.

Weirdly, there were times when Zito and Hudson talked over each other and the blend of their voices sounded like someone totally different, like Chavez’s father without the accent.

“You know about how, with the thing?” Zito said, having lost almost all of his consonants, each word a shapeless mushy thing.

“Yeah, yeah,” Hudson answered, and Chavez imagined Zito’s hands somehow making sense of that, the way Zito’s hands could make sense of most everything.

“I didn’t mean to. I was kinda fucked up. But I’m not anymore.”

“Not fucked up anymore?” Hudson repeated, rich with Scotch and disbelief. “Ah, I don’t believe you, baby.” Chavez blinked, and imagined Zito flushing happily the way he did every time Hudson said something like that to him.

“What? You don’t know.” Zito sounded curt and drunk, spoiling for a fight. “I wasn’t just gonna be stupid and fucked up over you forever. I got a life.”

Hudson didn’t answer, and Zito made an unhinged giggling noise. “Oh, I’m sorry, did I mention it? Did I break the golden rule?” He giggled again, and Chavez heard one of them slamming a cabinet shut.

“Be quiet,” Hudson said sharply. “You’re sayin’ stuff you’ll regret.”

“But, listen, listen to me, Timmy,” Zito said. “I just wanted you to, to know. So you wouldn’t worry about me trying anything or anything. Because I’m not like that anymore.”

“Well, good for you, man. Congratulations and shit. Jesus.”

“You’re mad at me?”

Hudson sighed loudly. “No. Quit lookin’ at me like that.” There was a pause, and Chavez studied the ceiling, the cracks in the plaster making sketches of branches and rivers.

“I’ll never do it again,” Zito said low, and Chavez had to tip his head closer to the doorway to hear him. “I can promise you that.”

Hudson didn’t say anything for a very long time, then he answered softly, “Good.”

Chavez snuck away, back into the living room where the others were arguing and laughing, and he tried not to care when Hudson came back alone, but five minutes later, he found himself going to Zito’s bedroom. The door was shut, but he was able to slip inside so quickly he wasn’t sure Zito even noticed.

Zito was lying on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. Chavez hesitated, then locked the door behind him.

“Rough night?” he said, standing over Zito with his hands in his pockets, awkward and unwanted. Zito flinched and turned his face away. Chavez climbed onto the bed and knelt beside Zito’s body, resting his hand on Zito’s side. Chavez found himself all-at-once terrified.

He wanted to say, let me know, give me some kind of warning. If you’re leaving, I’ll need to be prepared. But that wasn’t the kind of thing they could ask of each other.

He lay down, not touching Zito, and hardly breathed for the long minutes that flicked past before Zito gave in and folded his hand around Chavez’s wrist, and everything was quiet then.

*

Then, in the middle of their third September, in the middle of an unseasonably brutal late-summer heatwave, Chavez was on his elbows and knees, his hands fisted in the sheets, and Zito was at his back, one hand on Chavez’s shoulder and the other hand on his hip, pulling him backwards with clean sharp motions, barely keeping a rhythm, and Chavez’s mind was crushed with deep glittering stars and flashbulbs. Zito was panting curses and his sweaty hair flagged at the back of Chavez’s neck, and neither of them heard the knocking at the door, but both of them heard:

“Hey— _fuck_!”

and then the door crashing shut.

“Who was that?” Chavez gasped, and bucked Zito off him, tore loose. Everything was moving faster than light. “Who was that?”

Zito rolled over onto his side with a pained look on his face, his teeth digging into his lip hard enough to draw blood. He looked amazingly old, in that moment. “You know who that was,” he said blankly, and shut his eyes tightly.

“Fuck,” Chavez stammered, panicked. He threw himself off the bed and pulled on a pair of sweatpants. “Fuck fuck _fuck_ , Barry, motherfucker,” and then he was running out the door, out into the heat.

He caught Mulder in the front yard, just before the porch light bled away onto the grass. He clutched Mulder’s arm and said breathlessly, “Mark.” Mulder ripped his arm away.

“No, wait, stop, please,” Chavez pleaded, and closed his hands in Mulder’s shirt. Mulder spun, pulling out of his grip, his face stunned and his eyes all fierce and bright.

“Get back in the house,” Mulder said, his voice stripped down.

“Don’t leave. Don’t freak out.”

Mulder laughed, tipping his head back. “Oh yeah, I’m the one freaking out. Sure.”

“I didn’t mean it,” Chavez said helplessly. “You’re supposed to be at dinner.”

“Yeah, I got stood up. The fuck does it matter?”

Chavez shook his head, his whole body trembling, the air heavy on his bare chest. “You weren’t supposed to see.”

“Well, Christ, I think I gathered that, thanks.” He pressed his lips together. “Fuck, Chavvy. Go take a shower, will you.”

Chavez winced, his whole body flushing, his hands twitching nervously at his sides. He could still feel Zito all around him, pressure on his lower back, finger-grips seared on his shoulder, his hip. The raw smell clinging to him. He clenched his teeth against the humiliation and the sweet pull of running away, and widened his eyes. “We have to talk first.”

A muscle in Mulder’s cheek jumped. “I don’t know why you think I care.”

Chavez’s mind hit a wall at a frantic speed, and his mouth dropped open slightly, something he thought only happened in stories.

Mulder snapped his head to the side. “Dude, you spent the first couple of months trying to fuck _me_. I knew you were. I knew you liked guys. Whatever.”

Chavez’s face darkened, and he stared at the trees over Mulder’s shoulder, the hard shiny lines of their cars.

“You’re an idiot, though,” Mulder continued, his eyes flashing. “Barry Zito? I mean, how fucking drunk are you?”

“I’m not drunk,” Chavez said without thinking. “It’s never been because we were drunk.”

And that stopped Mulder, the same wall, maybe, transferred magically through space and time. Mulder blinked at him. “Wait, what do you—tonight wasn’t the. More than once? You’ve done that more than once?”

Chavez almost had to laugh. He wanted his throat scraped up, his eyes dry. But he just smiled, tiny sad curve of his lips, something shrinking inside him. “For years,” he answered. “He’s fucked me for years.”

Mulder’s eyes got big, and Chavez shook his head, swallowing past something painful, thinking sickly about the kid that Mulder brought home so long ago, who couldn’t play videogames and didn’t understand sarcasm.

“Since he was a rookie. Since you were. It’s been like this right from the start.”

And Mulder just stared at him with a flat shocked look in his eyes, and Chavez bit the inside of his cheek.

“You, you.” Mulder stopped, cleared his throat. “That long?” Chavez nodded, a cold empty spot growing in his stomach. “But he’s. He’s nothing. How can you even take him seriously?”

“I didn’t say I took him seriously,” Chavez said, tasting ash, lying boldly in the porch-light. “I just said I fucked him. That’s not the same at all.”

“God, Eric, what does it fucking _matter_?” Mulder asked, snapping his head to rid himself of the image, his shoulders high and tense. “You don’t need my approval or anything. You want to believe he’s worth more than he is, then fine.”

“I know exactly what he’s worth!” Chavez cried, and it echoed. It floated back to them. “What’s so bad about wanting anything instead of nothing?”

Mulder’s jaw tightened, and Chavez wanted to spread his arms then, lift his chin—all this could have been yours. And see Mulder’s face snarl, see him turn away in disgust for the third time.

“It’s just really fucking sad, man,” Mulder told him. “That’s all.”

Chavez couldn’t find the breath in him to answer. Mulder shook his head, and said, “I’ll find someplace else to sleep tonight. Lock the goddamn door next time.”

And Chavez blinked and Mulder was a pair of headlights sinking into the trees. Chavez stood there for a moment longer, and then went back inside, the surface of his skin perfectly numb.

Zito was sitting on the edge of the bed, fully dressed, chewing on his thumbnail. His face had a drawn cast to it, the look he got when he’d made up his mind about something.

“He, uh. He didn’t exactly take it well,” Chavez said, leaning on his shoulder in the doorway. He couldn’t believe it, it had happened so fast. Never be the same again, and not ten minutes ago he was hot and eager, crystal-clear on what he wanted and how to get it.

“I know,” Zito said, and angled his head towards the open window. “I heard.”

Whatever he’d been intending to say died a violent death in his throat, and Chavez experienced a lunatic burst of anger at the weather, the fucking heatwave, and his bedroom window open all the time, anything to get some air, and Zito had heard everything.

He was frozen, couldn’t even find the words to say he was sorry, he didn’t mean it, and he heard Mulder in his head, over and over again: ‘he’s nothing, he’s nothing.’ And Chavez standing with the grass up to his ankles, not denying it.

Zito stood up, sweat slicked on his throat, blackening his hair, and said without emotion, “I’ll see you around, man.”

And then Eric Chavez had no one.

*

Things lost their focus, after that.

Chavez lived as if on glass, walking gingerly and not speaking too loudly. Mulder only answered direct questions. Zito wouldn’t talk to him at all. Chavez sat in the clubhouse holding a newspaper open, staring at the same page until the ink soaked into his eyes and turned everything gray.

He didn’t sleep for four days, and then passed out on the bus. It took the guys way too long to wake him up, and everyone got worried and started treating him like an invalid. He didn’t care. He didn’t even really notice.

The season ended exactly the same as the last two. Chavez saw Zito weeping in one of the trainer’s rooms after the fifth game, Hudson sitting beside him with his arm around Zito’s shoulders. Mulder’s stuff was already packed and boxed up in the hallway when he got home, and Chavez slept for days, woke up to an empty house.

Chavez spent a week in San Luis Obispo, where he was completely unknown. Zito won the Cy Young and Chavez watched the press conference from his hotel room, Zito wearing that shirt he loved with the stupid-looking kid on it, his hair all highlit-blond and fucked up like he’d showered and not combed it, a couple of days’ scruff on his face.

Chavez almost had to throw his car keys out the window to keep from driving back and begging on his knees. Of all the things he never thought he’d be.

He went home for Thanksgiving, and home for his birthday, and home for New Year’s, and then he just gave up and stayed. San Diego was coated in salt, too thick to breathe in. Every night, he woke up four or five times, jerked harshly upwards with the pale glow of the nightlight in the hall streaming under his bedroom door.

He thought about Zito, and maybe making it right, with Mulder in Chicago and Hollywood still only an hour’s drive away if he ignored the speed limit. He thought about being able to sleep again, and being free of the press of misery at his temples, but in the end he just went down to the shore and watched the boys surfing for hours at a time.

His dreams were silent movies, black-and-white and big emotional eyes. He started wearing a small gold crucifix around his neck again, for the first time since he lost his old one on a road trip his second year up, started attending Bible study classes on Thursdays in the basement of his parents’ church, backdropped by cinder blocks and bulletin boards.

Down in the church basement, sometime in early February, he met a girl. Alex of the blonde hair and blue eyes and all the things he was supposed to have been looking for. It had been at least three years since this happened. But he remembered how to do everything, so it was okay.

In Phoenix, he made sure to say it loudly, I got a new girlfriend, you wanna see pictures? Because Zito still wouldn’t look at him and Mulder was never where Chavez thought he’d left him. He told Byrnes about Alex, and knew the whole team would hear by lunch.

Spring training took him to pieces. His muscles would lock up every night, and he would lay there, clawed, bled dry, heartbroken and imagining the looks on everyone’s faces when he told them he couldn’t, so sorry, can’t do this anymore. But in the morning, he found it in him somehow, to get up, go back out there, and even smile, when the cameras were on him.

Two days before they went home to play a three-game exhibition series in San Francisco, Chavez broke down, ended up curled on the tile floor of the bathroom with his hands over his ears, his eyes on fire. But no one was there to see it, so it didn’t count.

*

After Zito’s first start of the season, which he won, Chavez cornered him in the trainer’s room, Zito sitting on the table with his back against the wall, the ice-pack strapped down around his shoulder. His head was back, his eyes closed, and when Chavez shut the door behind him, Zito dropped his head and looked at him with an unreadable expression. They were quiet for a long time.

“Say something,” Chavez said, sounding rough and unfamiliar to his ears. “Say anything, quit pretending it didn’t happen. I know you can still see me, so please. Please. I don’t even care anymore, I just need you to say something to me, okay?”

Zito looked at him forever, amazing dark eyes, shadows underneath like the way Chavez would remember him.

“I saw this guy on the street in the city the other day,” Zito said eventually, and Chavez thought he must have passed out, this must be a dream, because Zito was just talking like it was nothing.

“Down by the ballpark, by the water. A homeless guy, right. He had a beat-up Che Guevara hat on and his shoes didn’t match. He had a sign, it was written on a piece of cardboard. It said: ‘Family kidnapped by ninjas. Need money for karate lessons.’”

Zito smiled. “Funny, huh?”

Chavez swallowed, managed to nod. Zito sighed, leaned his head back against the wall. “I kinda hate you, you know.”

Chavez nodded again, his eyesight hazing. “So do I.”

Zito’s throat twitched, and Chavez thought about setting his teeth down there, skidding his hand above Zito’s knee. The white of the tape contrasted sharply with Zito’s skin, the pasty wall behind his head like the background of a photo.

“Listen to me, man, are you listening?” Zito asked.

“Listening,” Chavez answered, balling his hands up into fists.

Zito met his eyes, looking four times too old, slow and defeated. “Forget about it. Let it go. It’s never gonna get any better until you accept that it wasn’t real.” Zito’s gaze flickered, like maybe he wanted to pull out, but instead he continued, “Promise me you’ll forget.”

And Chavez stared at him, the solemnity in Zito’s face, the small pretty set of Zito’s mouth, and it was the best thing he’d ever done, the moment when he turned and walked out without saying a word.

*

Chavez had moved into a brand-new apartment building downtown, and at the All-Star break, Alex moved in with him. They were in something resembling love, or at least, that’s what she kept telling him. He still wasn’t sleeping, so it made no difference to him.

Over at the new house that Mulder had rented for the season, where he wasn’t really welcome and yet somehow constantly found himself, Chavez was drunk and lying down on the diving board, the pebbly-gravel surface combing through his hair. The board was bent under his body; he kept thinking he was gonna slide off, crash into the water, and then sober right up and drive home.

Instead, though, Mark Ellis came looming over him, a sneaky little grin on his face, the saucer moon set gently atop his head.

“Hey man, you okay?”

Chavez made a smile and nodded, scraping the back of his head on the board. He was perfect, he always had been.

“Well, good,” Ellis said. “’Cause look who I found.” He stepped away and then Alex’s face floated into view, supernaturally pale.

Chavez squinted, and mumbled, “Elly, I think I passed out. Dreaming?”

Alex looked down at him worriedly. “No, baby, I came to pick you up. Mark called me.”

“Not me,” Ellis contributed helpfully. “The other Mark.”

“Mulder’s got your number?” Chavez asked, so confused his head hurt. He wanted to see Zito, Zito made everything very simple. But Zito wasn’t here tonight. Chavez kept expecting him to be, night after night, but Zito never came around anymore.

“You left your phone inside, ‘member? You know you got like fourteen Alexes in your contacts?” Ellis kept bobbing in and out of his peripheral vision, making him feel exponentially drunker.

“Yeah I know. So?”

Alex slid a hand under his neck and helped him sit up, straddling the board with his bare feet brushing the concrete. “Come on, Eric, I’ll take you home.”

Chavez blinked towards the house, the apricot-colored lights and his bedroom window glowing blue; he must have left his computer on. “Don’t I live here?”

Ellis snorted, and gave Alex a hand guiding him off the board. “Don’t mind him,” he said to Chavez’s girlfriend. “He gets lost when he’s this drunk. He’ll be all right in the morning.”

They went through the house and Chavez leaned hard on Ellis’s arm, because Alex couldn’t support his weight. Mulder saw him go by from the kitchen and raised a hand, but Chavez was spinning, dissolving.

In the shotgun seat, Chavez curled up as best he could and rested his head on the seat, the cool white leather under his cheek, and Alex left the radio on low, didn’t try to make him talk. Chavez held onto his knees and bit his lip to keep from saying, turn around, take me back.

*

He got married in December, several months past the end of one more season. The whole thing was getting spooky, every year the same exact form of heartbreak, and he decided to mix it up a bit, get married, that was new and different. Though of course he’d been married before. But this wasn’t like that.

He thought back and couldn’t remember much of the last half of the season. He decided that must be because Alex had been taking up so much of his attention, and that meant he loved her.

There was a reoccurring theme in his mind all the time, though, a stupid catchy song that he couldn’t shake. This afternoon a couple of years ago, an off-day, and Zito had shown up at the house past noon, in flip-flops and torn jeans, sunglasses and a beanie. How he’d leaned up against Chavez when Mulder left to go to the store, warm and soft, and kissed him. How Zito tasted like toothpaste, and Chavez thought plainly, ‘motherfucker just woke up.’

That was something that had stuck with him.

They spent a week in San Diego after the wedding, before they would leave for their honeymoon, a big hotel in a small town on the Pacific Ocean. In the white house that Chavez had bought his parents, the windows of the guest room crawled with trees branches, and Chavez got two full nights of sleep before Zito called him at one in the morning.

Zito sounded drunk, and Chavez hissed, “shut up for a second,” and stumbled downstairs, shrugging on a zippered sweat shirt and going barefoot onto the front porch, where he wouldn’t wake anyone up.

“What do you want?” he asked Zito.

“Chavvy, dude. What’s up?”

Chavez sat on the steps, rubbing his face with his hand. “Kidding, right?”

“No, definitely not kidding,” Zito answered after a moment of thought. “I can call. Nobody ever said I couldn’t call.”

“Look, I appreciate it,” Chavez said, watching his hand curl into a fist on his knee, release, tighten again. “But it’s really not the best time.”

“Well, of course, Chavvy, that’s the whole point.”

“Okay. Good night,” Chavez told him, and the phone was halfway down when Zito said quickly:

“I could come down you know.”

Chavez sighed, closed his eyes against the burn of the streetlight, and lifted the phone to his ear.

“You could, huh?”

Zito made a weird high laughing sound. “’Course. It’s only an hour.”

“If you speed.”

“I’ll speed.”

Chavez flinched and suddenly the world was clear again. The wrecked feeling in his chest, all at once gone, a wish come true. And he would say, ‘you coulda been here the whole time,’ and Zito would get arrested driving so fast. Chavez rifled through his mind, did he have the cash to pay Zito’s bail?

His brand-new wedding ring clicked against the phone, and he said into the scratchy echo of his own voice, “Stay there. Don’t move.”

Zito breathed heavily for a few minutes, sounding like he did when he was getting sick, and Chavez wanted to buy him orange juice and 7-Up, wrap him up in blankets on the couch and watch movies all day, until Zito’s eyes were glassy from the medicine and all symptoms were gone.

Zito asked, “What about next year, dude?”

“What about it?”

“You’re not going to sign,” Zito said with accusation wrenched all through his tone.

Chavez squeezed his eyes shut tighter. “Who told you that?”

“Billy says you want too much.”

“Billy should know what it’s like.” Zito also shouldn’t be friends with Beane the way he was, either, but that was a different conversation.

“But, Chavvy,” Zito said breathlessly. “If you don’t sign, what’ll happen next year?”

Chavez shook his head. “Next year you’ll play baseball, and I’ll play baseball, and we’ll see each other sometimes.” He smiled faintly. “Just like every year.”

“I’ll forge your name if I have to. I’ll tell Billy you said it was cool.”

Biting the inside of his cheek, Chavez told him, “Don’t do anything. It doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

Zito paused. “It’d be the worst thing you ever did. Just so you know.”

“Thank you, Barry. That’s just what I wanted to hear.”

They fell silent, and after a half a minute, Zito hung up softly. Chavez listened to the dial tone for a while, and then went back to his wife.

*

He signed. Of course he signed. How could he leave, he’d just gotten married. This was a family, now, and families have homes. It all made a lot of sense when he thought of it like that.

And he was so fucking rich now, he didn’t know what to do with himself. But, okay. Inevitable.

In Phoenix, anyway, there were a few weeks when Dave Stewart kept saying that if Chavez didn’t get a new contract before the season started, they’d walk. Their hypothetical destination was still hazy. It was strange, being around the guys like that.

He looked around once, thought about how he’d never get to see any of the others in this desert light again. Last spring training, last year, and what was it gonna be like when Mulder was just another visiting player, and Hudson, and Ellis, and all the rest. It seemed impossible, to leave now, right before everything.

But then he signed. And so he didn’t have to worry about that anymore.

He broke his hand, he went back to Triple-A and played like living in a fever dream until they flew him back to Oakland, proclaimed him healed.

Zito started very badly and Mulder started very, very well, and sometimes he and Mulder would rag on Zito like they used to, way back when. Chavez thought maybe Mulder was letting it go, at last.

Hudson got hurt, same as every year, and palled around with Mark Ellis in a weird show of DL solidarity for a week, then gave up and went to pour something from the refrigerator over Zito’s head. It was seven hundred degrees in Oakland and even hotter in Chicago, and Eric Chavez was worth every penny.

Then, as was widely reported, the Oakland A’s fell apart. Mark Mulder first, and then one by one until Bobby Crosby had the lowest batting average of any man ever elected Rookie of the Year, and Chavez had lost fifteen pounds.

By the end, only Zito and Harden were playing like they knew how, and by then it was far too late. One game out of first place, and Mulder almost threw Zito through the plate glass office window in the clubhouse, because Zito had shot his mouth off, or sneered, or something.

And Billy Beane wouldn’t say anything about what was gonna happen in the off-season, but pretty much everyone had money on it being either Zito or Hudson. Chavez figured that was about right, he was about ready to be glad if he didn’t have to see Zito’s face every day anymore.

Then the Bay Area was hit hard by autumn, and it was always colder than it looked.

Anyway, a year passed.

*

In December, it was a difference of two days. A winter afternoon in Oakland, and Chavez was drinking coffee and watching a soccer game on ESPN Deportes. Dave Stewart called and said grimly, “Hudson’s a Brave. That’s one.”

He spent the evening on the phone. Called everyone he knew. Sadly, he was thrown enough to talk to reporters too, and the next day the amusing trade-story sidebar was him at his betrayed, vengeful best.

He thought he’d prepared himself. Hudson was the one he’d miss least, that was for sure. Still. It was the trade season, everybody was on edge.

Chavez didn’t try to call Zito. He heard from Hudson and Mulder that Zito wasn’t answering, anyway.

Mulder said, “So, this’ll be interesting,” a thousand miles away in Arizona.

Chavez rolled his eyes. “What, you and Zito being one-two? Yeah, gonna freak the fuck out of me.”

It would be a strange season, though. Hudson was clearly the one Billy should have kept. Anyone could see that.

So that was that, and by the second morning, they’d all kinda settled down. It was still not too good, and Chavez took on the strategy of hanging up on reporters, because he couldn’t keep his fucking mouth shut.

That was Saturday. It was afternoon again, very cold with the wind from off the bay. Chavez was taking his dog to go mess around in the park. The sun was already most of the way down, so everything was blue and gold. His phone went off, Stew again, and Chavez figured he just wanted to check in.

He had to be told four times before he believed it, he kept thinking Stew was just fucking with him. He didn’t stay on the phone long. He whistled for Tank and they walked home.

A whole different kind of shock. Like something had been ripped away.

He called Mulder from his kitchen, leaning hard on the counter. Mulder was on a golf course, and Chavez said quickly, “Stew says you play for St. Louis now.”

Turned out Mulder hadn’t heard, and all Chavez was at that point was the bearer of bad news. Mulder told him, “You don’t know, all sorts of shit gets said. I wanna hear it from my guy, or from Billy, and then I’ll worry.”

It was on SportsCenter before Beane finally called Mulder, and Mulder was kind of just an incoherent bewildered person giving interviews from the desert for awhile.

The next morning, Chavez did try to call before he drove to Hollywood to find Zito. Zito would never give him credit for that, but he did try, from the highway through the valley, he called and Zito never picked up. Nobody’d seen him in a week. His parents were starting to get audibly worried through the loose phone network of the team, which meant Zito was ignoring his _mother_ , which meant he was well fucked up.

Chavez figured, somebody had to do something.

He stopped by Zito’s place in Van Nuys, and Zito’s sister told him Zito had left a note that read, ‘don’t flip, I’ll be back,” on the kitchen table, and left without his phone charger or his guitar. Chavez made her tea and reminded himself to call Zito a drama queen once he finally found the little punk.

He went to a bunch of diners and a couple of bars that looked Zito’s version of cool, but nothing. Los Angeles was shiny and dirty the way it always was, the streets overly crowded with homeless people this time of year, the seasonal migrants. Chavez drove around, insanely tired, thinking about Mark Mulder.

It was two in the morning before he wandered out of West Hollywood and recognized the neighborhood. Chavez remembered Thanksgiving several years ago, drunk on this sidewalk.

He found Zito’s old building and if he was counting windows right, Zito’s television was on.

Zito didn’t look exactly surprised to see him. But he did look like he he’d been beaten up and then not allowed to sleep for five days, so maybe he was just too weak to show anything now.

Zito leaned against the door with a sigh. Chavez stayed in the hall, asking, “You’re still paying rent on this piece of shit place?”

“Like I’m really gonna feel the pinch. Anway,” Zito rolled his head back. “I always wanted to have two apartments in the same city.”

“Can I come in?” Chavez pressed his fist to the doorframe, feeling shaky and sorta angry.

“Oh, sure, how fucking rude of me,” and Zito could still show sarcasm, at least. He swept his arm. “Make yourself at home. But take off your shoes. New carpet.”

Chavez hung his jacket up next to Zito’s blue raincoat, the one that was just a little bit too big for him.

Zito was already back on the couch when Chavez came in, drinking a silver can of PBR and watching a vampire movie. The room smelled like pot and Febreeze.

“Excuse me,” Chavez said after a moment. “What the fuck are you doing?”

Zito nodded towards the screen. “It’s Warhol’s version. It’s really messed up.”

“Okay, um, whatever,” Chavez said, shaking his head. He turned the lights on, and Zito winced like he’d not seen daylight for a month. “Dude.”

“What?” Zito said. “Go ahead, you drove all this way.”

Chavez balled his hands up. Zito was just slumped down with his feet on the coffee table, as if it was nothing.

“Somebody had to come get you.”

“And you, you lost the coin flip, right? Great.” Zito finished his beer and snapped the can hard across the room, the sudden cut of his arm startling Chavez. The can dented against the wall, right under the window, no doubt precisely where Zito had aimed it.

“Sorry if I fucking interrupted your little vacation, man. But I’m getting pretty tired of talking to your mom, okay?”

Zito looked up, his eyes flashing white. But he didn’t say anything. Chavez kept wanting to shake Zito or slap him, wake him up.

“So why don’t you just come home?” Chavez asked, forcefully keeping his voice even. “You should hear what they’re saying about you. That this is what it’ll be like without them, you just disappearing whenever we need you.” Chavez paused, pressure building on his shoulders, tightening his chest. “Everybody else is already over it.”

“Oh, yeah, I’m so fucking _sure_ , dude,” Zito sneered, crossing his arms over his chest. “You look real over it to me.”

Chavez shook his head sharply, biting his teeth together. “You’re the one who won’t even talk to anyone.”

“Who am I supposed to talk to? There’s, like, two other guys in the world who know what this means, and I don’t want to talk to Hudson because it’ll be terrible, and I.” Zito sighed, dropping his head back against the couch and closing his eyes. “I’ve never really liked Mulder.”

Chavez snorted. “Now the truth comes out.”

“It’s mainly because he doesn’t like me, though.” Zito’s face twisted slightly. “Fuck.”

Chavez let his hands go loose, willing himself to take a breath and calm down. The muscles in his back ached. He didn’t say anything for awhile, trying to picture the first road trip of the season, when Zito would get drunk and start looking for Hudson’s room in the hotel, and Chavez would go to bed early and never forget to call his wife.

“They’ve always been here, you know?” Zito said, his eyes still shut, the exhaustion creeping into his voice. “Everything else got different.”

“Yeah.”

And Chavez thought about their five-years-ago team, when Mulder was too thin and Hudson had hair and no tattoos. When Zito was an afterthought and Eric Chavez didn’t understand anything.

Chavez looked down at Zito, the fight draining out of him, Zito’s neck stretched out and his hair falling across his forehead. They were the only two left and Chavez had driven too far not to believe that that mattered in some way.

He crossed to stand in front of Zito, and wrapped his hand in Zito’s shirt at the shoulder. Zito’s eyes came open swiftly, glinting with surprise and suspicion. Chavez could feel Zito’s shoulder tensing.

“Settle down,” he said. “I’m not doing anything.”

Zito lifted his eyebrows. “Yeah?”

Chavez shrugged. “Nothing you have to worry about.”

The corner of Zito’s mouth curved up. “You’re just. I don’t know. It’s probably not a good time.” But he didn’t knock Chavez’s hand off.

Chavez swallowed hard, and stroked Zito’s neck with his thumb, told him quietly, “I thought it’d be you.”

Zito nodded, and Chavez slid his hand into Zito’s hair. “So did I,” Zito answered, and pulled Chavez down.

The movie ran through to snow, sounding like the ocean, and Zito kept moving above him, his face fuzzy, sweat in his hair and his eyes, his hand cupped on the line of Chavez’s jaw.

They fell asleep on the floor. When the sun came up, they awoke and stumbled to the bedroom, where they tried it again, this time slower and more unconsciously, Chavez brightly aware of the feel of Zito’s shoulder blades under his hands, and then they fell back asleep.

In the afternoon, Zito woke him up again by making coffee. Chavez took a shower before dressing in last night’s clothes and going out to the kitchen. Zito was sipping his coffee at the table, blankly reading the free neighborhood newspaper. Chavez fixed a cup and sat across from him.

After a few minutes, Zito looked up, his face drawn, and said, “I’m sure if we try hard enough, we can pretend this didn’t happen.”

Chavez couldn’t think of anything to say to that.

“I think it was, like, the shock?” Zito said, staring down at his hands on the table. “And the history, or whatever. Obviously it wasn’t gonna be a, you know, a clean break.”

Chavez wondered which break Zito was talking about, but it seemed inconsequential.

“You’ve got your own stuff, now,” Zito continued. “And so do I. Kinda. Anyway.”

He sighed, and looked at Chavez expectantly. But Chavez stayed quiet, thinking that at least it was December and he had three months to figure out how to play through this.

“I’ll come home in a day or so,” Zito told him. “Tell everybody to calm down. I’m not doing anything crazy, I promise.”

Chavez found himself nodding. He finished his coffee, and stood, feeling hungover even though he hadn’t been drinking. He said, “I guess I’ll go then.”

Zito nodded, and Chavez felt a burn behind his eyes, and he said plainly, “Not everything is different, you know.”

Zito’s eyes widened, and a second later, he smiled.

*

And this is how it is now:

Though they go through an atrocious start, eventually everyone kinda gets used to the team as it is now. The first two months linger, strung up in the stillness of the team plane flying east through the night, but they repair quickly, willfully shortening their memories, and June is beautiful. They shed years: between Joe Blanton and Danny Haren and Nick Swisher and Dan Johnson and Huston Street, it’s everybody’s rookie year again.

Hudson keeps in touch and Mulder doesn’t really, except sometimes when he calls Chavez, inevitably hammered, wanting the details of some night several years past. Chavez watches the Cardinals win every night on the out-of-town scoreboard; they’re pulling away in the Central Division. Hudson hits a double in Atlanta in one of his first at-bats, and Zito can be heard yelling into his phone from the hallway, “That’s my boy, _that’s_ what I want to see.”

Chavez starts to see the ball again, and they pass just having a good run, contenders again. He stays home a lot, because Alex is pregnant and he’s not a kid anymore. He sleeps better now. He only wakes up sore because of the game, these days. He listens to the same CD on repeat in his car until he has an oh-fer night and needs to change the luck. He keeps himself together.

Zito pitches well all season, save one game in Tampa when he loses his way very badly and fucks up his ERA for months. By the break, Chavez and everyone else finally have to admit—Zito has never been better. Zito’s new slider is immediately recognized by Chavez, and he wonders if Mulder had gone to an American League team, would he still have taught Zito that?

Chavez sees Zito come and go, and he picks Zito’s jersey off the couch, tossing it into Zito’s locker. They’ll never again be friends, if they ever were, but now Zito doesn’t get that sick look on his face when Chavez is in the room. He just looks normal. They both do.

Except for once a week or so, when Zito will meet Chavez’s eyes and look so unbelievably tired it hurts to see it. But that’s nothing that Chavez can really fault him for.

Zito cracks jokes and answers every question the children of the rotation ask him. He keeps his head up, kept his composure when his record was 1-7 and they hadn’t scored more than two runs for him in a month.

Everybody likes Zito more this year. He’s quieter, and steadier, doesn’t act up all the time, never catches anyone off guard. Chavez thinks maybe Hudson was who made Zito manic, and Mulder who made him petty and spiteful. It’s not particularly important, of course. All that counts is that Zito shows up every day.

Chavez dreams, rarely, of life as it will be if neither he nor Zito ever leaves Oakland. What Zito will look like when he’s twenty-eight, thirty, thirty-five, whether he’ll ever cut his hair short again or grow another beard. Whether Zito will still be afraid of thunderstorms, and whether Chavez will ever let himself understand that Zito’s the one he wants the most, no matter how they got started or how it ended. What Chavez’s son will call Zito when Chavez brings him to the ballpark.

They’ll get used to it, the wrench inside when they see each other, until it won’t even register anymore. They’ll pretend other nights don’t happen, and be stuck like this forever.

Mostly, though, Chavez can only see life as it is now, this green-blue summer and the sunlight cut like glass, each day one day closer to whatever is coming next.

And sometimes, after games, Zito brings Chavez a Coke in the clubhouse, both of them with hair wet from the showers, their muscles shivering. They sit next to each other at the non-poker table in the corner, far enough away from the guys to not get dragged into anything, their shoulders close together, their breath perfectly timed, and they don’t say a word, silently watching their team.

THE END

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The Kid from Hollywood](https://archiveofourown.org/works/263318) by [candle_beck](https://archiveofourown.org/users/candle_beck/pseuds/candle_beck)




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